To the Chekhovs, 18 January 1891. Petersburg.
ЧЕХОВЫМ, 18 января 1891 г. Петербург.
Headnote
A short family letter of 18 January 1891, from Petersburg, addressed (per the envelope) to Chekhov’s sister Maria Pavlovna ("Masha") in Moscow. Chekhov was in Petersburg that winter on the same round of society fundraising for the Sakhalin schools seen in neighboring letters of this period; here he reports a call on the jurist Anatoly Fyodorovich Koni to discuss Sakhalin, and a plan to visit Yelizaveta Alekseyevna Naryshkina the following Tuesday to enlist her in approaching the Empress about funding a shelter for Sakhalin’s children.
The rest is brisk domestic business and gossip in the familiar running-item mode of his letters home: a request to look after Modest Tchaikovsky (brother of the composer) when he calls to see the family’s pet mongooses; a newspaper clipping – a satirical verse about lady amateur actors – to be posted at a school as a joke; an offer of money; thanks for a congratulatory telegram (occasion unspecified in the text); a wry note on being over-fed at social calls; the deadpan-exaggerated news of a seventeenth child born to the writer Kazimir Barantsevich; and a note that Chekhov bought toys for his young nephew Anton (son of his brother Alexander) on the boy’s name-day.